Personalizing and Empowering Special Education

Across the nation, states are facing pressure to halt charter school growth. California’s Los Angeles school district requested a state moratorium on charter schools. Oakland officials implemented a local moratorium themselves. Kentucky lawmakers refuse to fund charters, and West Virginia delegates tabled legislation that would have made state charter schools possible.

But few realize that these efforts cripple opportunity for the students who struggle most.

Today, only 69% of special education students graduate from high school on time, compared to 84% of all students. In reading, only 12% of high school seniors with disabilities test at or above proficiency on national assessments and in math only 6% test proficient.

Yet, special education experts suggest that up to 90 percent of special education students are capable of graduating from high school prepared for higher education or a career, if only they receive appropriate educational opportunities—the kind of opportunities charter schools provide.

Like public schools, charters do not discriminate against applicants and they do receive public funding. But unlike public schools, charters are free to develop the curricula that work best for each of their students.

“Charter schools are better positioned to serve the needs of special needs students and those with diverse learning needs primarily because we have the power of innovation,” said Andreya Sampy, former director of special populations at KIPP Houston Public Schools and now Director of Special Populations at the charter school, BakerRipley’s Promise Community School.

For a nation struggling to empower students with special needs, charter schools offer innovative and personalized solutions.

Thrive Public Schools, for example, a public charter school system in San Diego, California serves 640 students. Of those, 16% have disabilities and 33% are English Language Learners. For some schools, these demographics might prove challenging, but for Thrive, they are an opportunity.

Rather than providing only special education students with personalized learning plans—which are required by law—Thrive provides every student with a personalized plan. Plans are set with the help of teachers who use technology-based programs to assess students’ individual areas of struggle and achievement, and by students themselves who track their own literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional goals.

In addition, Thrive focuses on project-based learning. Students, special education and otherwise, collaborate to design and build projects like LED lanterns for refugees settling in San Diego from Syria, and work with real-world experts to design business plans and sell their products.

Thrive’s unique learning strategies are empowering their students to succeed. Although Thrive was founded only four years ago, the school is in the 96th percentile for academic growth, and they score in the top 1 percentile nationally for growth in reading.

Nor is Thrive alone. In New York, Mott Haven Academy, an independent public charter school focuses especially on meeting the unique needs of students in the child welfare system, where children are around three times as likely to qualify for special education compared to their peers.

To provide for this unique student-base, Mott Haven provides trauma-sensitivity training to all leaders and teachers, encourages evidence-based practices and collaboration among teachers to accommodate different learning styles, and works with child welfare and community-based organizations to provide families with the housing, medical, and mental health support they need to provide their student with a healthy learning environment.

And Mott Haven students are outperforming their peers in learning assessments. In 2018, 50% of Mott Haven students met state English standards, compared to 30% of comparable public school district students, and 57% of students met State Math standards, compared to 30% of comparable public school district students.

Parents nationwide are asking for their special-needs children to have the same enriching educational experience as those at Thrive and Mott Haven. In Philadelphia for example, charter schools received thousands of applications for a couple hundred openings. And in New York City, nearly 80,000 students applied to charter schools, surpassing the number of available seats by over 50,000.

Special education students face some of the worst odds of learning and graduating in our public education system. They should not have to struggle to gain access to the educational opportunities that truly do set them up for success. Instead of shutting the door on charter schools, lawmakers and the communities behind them should be looking for opportunities to help charters grow to serve the communities that need them most.

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Dummy Maxine Waters Grills Big Bank CEOs About Student Loans — Which Were Nationalized in 2010

And this pea brain is the chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee! How did America sink so low?

Rep. Maxine Waters seemed to demonstrate that she is in over her head Wednesday when she queried several bank executives about student loans even though they were nationalized under former president Obama nearly a decade ago.

Waters is the chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee -- the committee that regulates the banks.

During a hearing examining the practices of some of the nation's biggest banks, Waters complained to a panel of seven bank CEOs that there are more than 44 million Americans that owe … $1.56 trillion in student loan debt."

She added, “Last year, one million student loan borrowers defaulted, which is on top of the one million borrowers who defaulted the year before.”

She then demanded to know what they intended to do about this massive problem. “What are you guys doing to help us with this student loan debt?" she asked. "Who would like to answer first? Mr. Monahan, big bank.”

Bank of America chairman and CEO Brian Monahan replied, “We stopped making student loans in 2007 or so.”

Ms. Waters replied, “Oh, so you don’t do it anymore. Mr. Corbat?”

Said Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat: “We exited student lending in 2009.”

James Dimon, JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO, finally spilled the beans: “When the government took over student lending in 2010 or so, we stopped doing all student lending,” he said.

Waters then quickly changed the subject to small businesses.

The Obama administration put the federal government in charge of student lending in 2010, with the intention of saving taxpayer dollars by “cutting out the middleman,” as President Barack Obama put it.

According to the Washington Times, "student loan debt exploded from $154.9 billion in 2009 to $1.1 trillion at the end of 2017"  with current student debt "estimated at more than $1.5 trillion."

Earlier in the hearing, Waters grilled the bank execs about their interactions with Russia.

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Illegal Aliens Get Democrat Money — Veterans, Not So Much

New York lawmakers reject a tuition-aid program to children of veterans killed in action.

Leftists and their policies have increasingly favored noncitizens over citizens, but Democrats in New York may well have set a new low. New York’s Higher Education Committee this week voted against advancing a bipartisan bill that would have provided free college tuition to the families of veterans killed in the line of duty. That’s bad enough, but this was after state lawmakers just last week passed a $175 billion budget that included $27 million in tuition aid to children of illegal aliens. By contrast, a few hundred thousand dollars will not be added to the existing program for 145 vets’ kids, which currently costs just $2.7 million — a mere tenth of the tuition aid that the state’s illegals will receive.

Several Republican lawmakers weren’t happy, and they blasted their Democrat counterparts. Assemblyman Gary Finch may have said it best: “It’s disgraceful. Soldiers who lay down their lives and make the ultimate sacrifice represent the best of us. The children they love so dearly deserve access to the opportunity and promise that is the hallmark of this country. I can’t imagine what’s in your heart when you vote ‘no’ on a bill like this.”

Republican Assemblyman Will Barclay, one of the bill’s cosponsors, surmised that partisanship was the real reason behind the Democrats’ “no” vote. “We get so caught up in majority and minority issues here, we can’t see the forest through the trees,” he said, adding, “I don’t know how they don’t justify this.”

Assemblywoman Deborah Glick (D), who chairs the committee and voted against the bill, claimed that concerns over the budget weighed against expanding the veteran tuition-aid program. But state Sen. Robert Ortt (R) wasn’t buying it: “Assemblywoman Glick should be ashamed of herself. We set aside $27 million for college for people that are here illegally. … Apparently $2.7 million is all that the families of soldiers who are killed get. If you’re a child of a fallen soldier, you do not rank as high and you know that by the money.”

Indeed, “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value” is a common refrain used by Joe Biden and other free-spending leftists, and it tells us all we need to know about “progressive” values. It would’ve been one thing if Democrats had refused to fund either program, as their fiscal concerns would’ve at least been believable. But giving handouts to those who aren’t even here legally while stiffing the children of Patriots who’ve given their lives for this great nation is simply despicable.

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